Lecture: Being a student at the Academy: Life Drawing Classes, Competitions and Study Trips

Tuesday 12th November, 2013

1:00pm - 2:00pm

Price: Admission Free

Ages: All Ages

Lecturer: Christoph Vogtherr

This lecture series delivered by Director of the Wallace Collection, Christoph Vogtherr, accompanies our current exhibition The Male Nude: Eighteenth-century drawings from the Paris Academy. Painting in eighteenth-century France before the Revolution was centred on the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture which had been founded in 1648. The purpose of the Academy was to train the most important artists and to provide them with the raw materials for successful history painting, which was by far the most esteemed genre for an artist to practise. Budding painters or sculptors would be apprenticed to a master, but much of their training would take place at the Academy where the drawing of the male human figure was at the core of the curriculum. These lectures will look at the foundation of the Academy, what it was like being a student, how the Academic movement spread across Europe throughout the Eighteenth century, and what happened to artists who remained outside the academic tradition.

Future lectures:

Tuesday 3 December The Academic Movement: Academies across Europe from Rome to the Royal Academy

Thursday 9 January Insiders and Outsiders: artists, innovation and the academies